There are areas of cities, suburbs and the countryside that are in a state of complete abandonment. These are places without an owner where anthropogenic waste converges, objects of all kinds are abandoned and destined for a new dimension and a new life. It is precisely in these places that Milanese artist Camilla Alberti (1994) collects materials for the creation of her sculptural and installation works in the Unbinging Creatures series. “Every material I collect is a fragment of a ruin,” she says in an interview on Formeuniche.

Camilla Alberti’s artistic research is based on the study of the relationships that each inhabitant, human and non-human, defines with his being in the world. The artist observes how a new habitat is created in these places, formed by objects from different niches that have lost their original form and function and now come into contact with animals, mosses and weathering, undergoing a process of metamorphosis. Boundaries are broken down and the process of identification is reworked through a process of “melting” that allows the object to incorporate itself with what is around it. “Hybridization becomes a biological obligation,” says the artist, fascinated by the process of urban archaeology that unites the natural and human worlds, creating a new one in which unexpected organisms are born.

Camilla Alberti’s creative process thus begins with finding abandoned objects, which include ceramics, glass, tree trunks, shells, industrial waste, and then continues in her studio, where the artist leaves them “at rest” in her garden. After time the objects undergo a new metamorphosis by which the artist is inspired. The construction of the sculptural bodies takes place after a study and care of the ruins collected and then received by Camilla, who assembles among them a careful selection, through aluminum wires and chalked bandages, obtaining intricate shapes with a monstrous appearance. Camilla Alberti is interested in the figure of the monster, understood as a hybrid organism, strange and uncontrollable, which in fairy tales goes against the protagonist’s intentions. By focusing on the figure of the antagonist, the artist proposes a change of point of view within the narrative in which it is precisely the monster that becomes the protagonist, undermining the anthropocentric figures of heroes, princesses and all those figures considered “good.”

The finds of urban archaeology handled by Camilla Alberti become dynamic, acquiring additional vitality through the relationships created between different fragments in which the identity of the individual gives way to a plurality. The atypical appearance of objects that the audience recognizes and perceives as familiar, placed in a condition of dialogue and fusion with as many others, disorients the viewer who is forced to reflect on the mechanisms of metamorphosis that the world itself performs on a daily basis.